Comparing a 50-attorney firm’s revenues and performance to another 50-attorney firm is not necessarily a good comparison, unless the firm’s infrastructure, compensation, and support models are the same as well, which is unlikely. When law firms start looking around and comparing themselves to their peers, most do not conduct an adequate apples-to-apples comparison in terms of how the firm is performing - this is one of the flaws to benchmarking performance data. It’s important to not solve too early but to identify why the waste is happening and get to the root cause. In addition to managing and pricing of legal services, we must also identify and carefully define the problems and opportunities - and it’s not just about identifying waste and what is occurring in a process. The need for project management and alternative fee arrangements came to the head of the line for many legal innovators in past cycles, but those things are not enough.
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That middle step involves process improvement. The pandemic crisis also allowed for a slow-down in thought that made people realize there was a “middle step” that wasn’t officially recognized during the last great upheaval, the Great Recession in 2008. This had its benefits in terms of pushing firms to look at how they perform and deliver legal services, and I think that in turn has brought process improvement to the forefront.
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And while process improvement has been around since the days of Taylorism, what has the pandemic done to bring a new emphasis to this area?įred Esposito: The pandemic offered many industries, legal among them, both an imperative and a pause in which to consider and change (out of sheer necessity) how they were doing business and what could be done better. Thomson Reuters Institute: Of all the massive changes that the pandemic crisis brought to the legal industry, you have said that one of the most important and yet relatively unheralded is the renewed focus on process improvement. In this post, we speak to Esposito about how law firms are approaching process improvement in the post-pandemic environment. He currently is working towards his Black Belt Certification. He is also a senior consultant with the Legal Lean Sigma Institute and a Certified Green Belt in Legal Lean Sigma with a Project Leader designation.
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Esposito has more than 25 years of law and accounting firm experience, is an author and speaker specializing in financial and organizational management, process improvement, and project management, and has managed and worked in a consulting capacity with several domestic and international law firms.
Sigma client not working series#
In a new series of blog posts, we discuss process improvement with Fred Esposito, COO of the regional law firm Rivkin Radler. How has the idea of process improvement taken hold in the legal industry in the wake of the pandemic? Fred Esposito of Rivkin Radler discusses how more law firms are leveraging this idea today